David Maraniss is a New York Times bestselling author, fellow of the Society of American Historians, and visiting distinguished professor at Vanderbilt University. He has been affiliated with the Washington Post for more than forty years as an editor and writer and twice won Pulitzer Prizes at the newspaper.

In 1993 he received the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting for his coverage of Bill Clinton, and in 2007 he was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the Virginia Tech shooting. He was a Pulitzer Prize finalist three other times, including for one of his books, They Marched into Sunlight. He has won many other major writing awards, including the George Polk Award for National Reporting, the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award, the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize, and the Frankfurt eBook Award.

Among his bestselling books are biographies of Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Roberto Clemente, and Vince Lombardi. When Pride Still Mattered: A Life of Vince Lombardi was hailed by Sports Illustrated as “maybe the best sports biography ever published.”

A Good American Family, Maraniss’s twelfth book, was released in May. He and his wife Linda, a retired environmentalist, live in Washington, DC, and Madison, Wisconsin, their hometown.

selected bibliography

A Good American Family: The Red Scare and My Father (2019)

Rome 1960: The Summer Olympics That Stirred the World (2008)

Clemente: The Passion and Grace of Baseball’s Last Hero (2006)

They Marched into Sunlight: War and Peace, Vietnam and America, October 1967 (2003)

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online resources

David Maraniss’s website
“La Vida Voices: Clemente Biographer Maraniss,” LaVidaBaseball.com, December 27, 2018
Maraniss on Interviewing Obama, Vanity Fair, May 2, 2012
Author interview with Maraniss in BookBrowse

Video: The Art of Biography and the Search for Truth